Rutgers amends Wright‑Rieman clean‑room project, increases budget to $9.9M after scope changes

The Board of Governors approved an amendment to an earlier resolution authorizing construction of a clean room and mass spectrometer laboratories in the Wright‑Rieman Laboratory building on the Busch Campus, raising the project’s estimated capital cost from $8.4 million to $9.9 million following scope adjustments and market repricing.

University materials say the project will provide specialized clean‑room laboratory and mass‑spectrometry instrument space to support Earth and planetary sciences research in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS). The updated scope reduced the prior footprint from roughly 3,000 square feet to about 1,750 square feet, removed certain lab spaces and equipment from the plan, and deleted renovations originally proposed for a third classroom. Administrators said the revisions balance budget pressures with the core research needs of EPS.

The materials presented to the Board characterize the clean‑room laboratory as enabling state‑of‑the‑art elemental and isotopic measurements for terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials and note that the facility would be one of only a small number of comparable labs worldwide. The project will house instrumentation funded by grants from NASA, NSF and Rutgers, including a next‑generation thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS) recently funded through a NASA‑Rutgers cost‑share grant.

The Committee on Finance and Facilities recommended the amendment; the resolution updates the authorized project cost to $9.9 million and states the expectation that the School of Arts and Sciences will fund the capital cost from reserves. The resolution also preserves the university’s option to finance the project with University‑issued debt in the future. The amendment was placed on the consent agenda and approved by the full Board without recorded discussion.